Who cares about TCO and ROI?!
As expected people care less about buisness acronyms and high words i.e. TCO, ROI, integrted stack, when real money are involved. I visioned confirmation of this during Oracle+Sun welcome event where all Oracles’/Suns’ consultants were touting about their integrated stack but felt short once asked about the price the customer will have to pay for the new support contract or the license fee for using Oracle on Sun hardware. The innovations and green technology are cool but everything grows dim in the face of a bill. To sweeten the pill, it has been said that once the integration process is completed the price-list for Sun hardware will probably be revised towards reduction.
What was really useful about visiting this event is a talk in the corridors which gave a hope that:
- Oracle will actually use its privilege of owning the whole stack (from software to disks) to make Sun+Oracle platform more winning and more attractive than any other competitive solutions from performance perspective.
- Next SPARC64 processors and M-series platform, which are planned to hit the market in 2012, will be 50/50, against todays 20/80, in terms of Sun/Fujitsu partnership. It’s well-known that contemporary SPARC64 CPUs are more Fujitsu brainchild than Sun’s.
- We were offered to take Sun T5220 equipped with SSDs and Sun Flash F20 PCIe for testing. Very sweet.